> The only awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address

I had one small business aggressively threaten me that they fully owned their business name and I wasn't allowed to use it in my email address.

My solution was to keep my wonderful aliases and dump them. If a business is concerned but nice about it I'll offer an alternative such as plumber@

> The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).

If you have your own domain most mail providers don't care what username@ you use on your sent mail so you shouldn't need any additional mailboxes (especially if they already offer inbound catch all)

I also use the ReplayAsOriginalRecipientUp [1] extension in Thunderbird which takes the recipient address and puts it as the sender for ongoing communication.

[1]: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/reply...

> I had one small business aggressively threaten me that they fully owned their business name and I wasn't allowed to use it in my email address.

I haven't had that, but before I switched to Hide My Email I've had many businesses ask if I was an employee of the business - many people don't intuit the difference between john@bank.com and bank@john.com.

"Sorry for the misunderstanding. My new email is yourcompanysucksinmyopinion@example.com."